The Screen of Screens is a blended investment approach devised by Stockopedia. It picks stocks that are appearing most frequently across all the 'Guru Screens' tracked by Stockopedia - be they quality, value, momentum, growth or income (excluding short-selling strategies). A stock must be appearing on at least four strategies before it can qualify for the Screen of Screens. Ed Page Croft, CEO of Stockopedia, says: ?One benefit of a blended approach such as the Screen of Screens is that it builds a portfolio exposed to many driving factors of stock returns at once.? By definition, this strategy tends to highlight a list of relatively defensive stocks because they exhibit good fundamentals across a wide range of investing disciplines. The strategy was highlighted in an Financial Times feature by David Stevenson titled: "Stock screens to net the ones that get away". In it he said: "You need to use a website or system that can run the screens for you, and then identify the stocks that come up most often in each of them, which is exactly what Stockopedia has done." more »

Warren Buffett - Hagstrom is a quality investing strategy inspired by modelling of Warren Buffett's investment approach in books by investment strategist Robert Hagstrom, including The Warren Buffett Way. It is a strategy that combines Buffett's focus on value and business quality. It uses price-to-free cash flow as a valuation measure and assesses quality using operating profit and return on equity. In his book, Robert Hagstrom explains: "Your goal as an investor should be simply to purchase, at a rational price, a part interest in an easily understood business whose earnings are virtually certain to be materially higher, five, ten, and twenty years from now." Remember, Buffett is famous for looking beyond financial measures when examining the quality of a business franchise. more »

R&D Breakthroughs is a quality investing strategy inspired by a screen devised by US journalist Jack Hough, in his book, Your Next Great Stock. It is partly based on research by Louis Chan, Josef Lakonishok and Theodore Sougiannis in paper called The Stock Market Valuation of Research and Development Expenditures. The strategy filters a value screen with quality factors related to how much a company is investing in its future development. It uses the price-to-research ratio to find value and compares R&D investment in relation to growth, sales and assets. The strategy seeks to identify research-led businesses that are investing significantly in future development in order to try to identify their potential future growth before the market does. Louis Chan wrote: "The clearest evidence that high R&D plays a distinctive role arises from stocks with high R&D relative to the market value of equity. Their average return over the following three years is 6.12% per year." more »

The Piotroski F-Score Screen is a quality strategy outlined by the famed academic Professor Joseph Piotroski and investigated further in a 2011 paper titled "Identifying expectation errors in Value/Glamour stocks". The strategy hunts for the best quality shares in the market regardless of price. In this version of the screen we have selected the highest scoring stocks in the market using Piotroski's nine-point fundamental checklist called the F-Score. While the F-Score was originally used only for filtering value stocks, Piotroski discovered it was just as effective for filtering glamour stocks: "Firms experiencing the strongest improvement in fundamentals (FSCORE ?7) generate a mean size-adjusted return of 5.5 percent annually". What Piotroski essentially was saying was that the highest scoring stocks returned 5.5% more than the market - these findings have been backed up by independent research by Societe Generale. Perhaps as a result the F-Score has become extremely popular with investors and is a core component of the Stockopedia StockReports. more »

The Magic Formula is a value investing strategy invented by the hedge fund manager Joel Greenblatt in the bestselling and highly recommended Little Book that Beats the Market. It focuses on finding quality value stocks using a blended ranking system (the Magic Formula rank) composed from two fundamental ratios: Return on Capital (which Greenblatt argues is the best determinant of whether a business is a good one) and Earnings Yield (his favoured measure for cheapness). He summarised his philosophy with the maxim "buying cheap stocks at bargain prices is the secret to making lots of money". In the fourth edition of his book Greenblatt claimed the top scoring portfolio of 30 stocks appreciated by 30.8% each year over the previous 17 years, though he stressed that the strategy could underperform during periods of up to two years. Having now sold hundreds of thousands of copies, the "Magic Formula" is credited for reinvigorating the practice of value investing. more »

Ronald Muhlenkamp Return on Equity is a quality investing strategy based on an approach used by US fund manager Ronald Muhlenkamp. It combines quality and value factors by looking for companies with a high return on equity (ROE) at a reasonable price. ROE is a measure of how much profit a company earns compared to the amount of shareholder equity on its balance sheet. Muhlenkamp compares ROE with other growth measures to find stocks that are likely to be highly cash generative. He said: "You want to be sure that the companies you own can survive whatever the heck happens." Muhlenkamp's methods were analysed by Ludwig B Chincarini and Daehwan Kim in Quantitative Equity Portfolio Management. They found that the Muhlenkamp fund averaged an 18.38% annual rate of return for the 19 years to 2004, versus 12.07% for the S&P 500. more »

Cash Accruals is a quality investing strategy inspired by research into the 'accrual anomaly' by American accounting professor Richard Sloan. In company accounts, accruals are adjustments made when revenues have been booked but cash has not yet been received. This screen uses low levels of accruals as a positive quality signal. It looks for companies with a low accrual ratio, where free cash flow is higher than net income and where earnings-per-share is growing. Professor Sloan's research found that: "...firms with relatively high levels of accruals experience negative future abnormal stock returns that are concentrated around future earnings announcements." The research found that companies with small or negative accruals vastly outperform (+10%) those with large accruals. It concluded that investors focus too heavily on earnings and not on cash generation and that the share prices of companies with high accruals are more likely to reverse in future years. more »

Warren Buffett Sustainable Growth is a quality investing strategy inspired by an interpretation of Warren Buffett's investment approach by Mary Buffett and David Clark in their book, The New Buffettology. It is a strategy that combines Buffett's focus on value and business quality. To work out whether the stock is reasonably valued, the strategy forecasts sustainable earnings growth; the higher that growth rate is, the more likely it is that the company has a durable competitive advantage. The strategy also looks for low debt and a growing earnings yield, return on equity and return on capital employed. In The New Buffettology, Mary Buffett and David Clark explain: "Consistency is everything. Warren is not after a company that occasionally has high returns on shareholders' equity, but one that consistently earns high returns." Remember, Buffett is famous for looking beyond financial measures when examining the quality of a business franchise. more »

Warren Buffett Historical Growth is a quality investing strategy inspired by an interpretation of Warren Buffett's investment approach by Mary Buffett and David Clark in their book, The New Buffettology. It is a strategy that combines Buffett's focus on value and business quality. To work out whether the stock is reasonably valued, the strategy uses historical earnings growth; the higher that growth rate is, the more likely it is that the company has a durable competitive advantage. The strategy also looks for low debt and a high earnings yield, return on equity and return on capital employed. In The New Buffettology, Mary Buffett and David Clark explain: "Historical per share earnings that are both strong and show an upward trend indicate a durable competitive advantage." Remember, Buffett is famous for looking beyond financial measures when examining the quality of a business franchise. more »